WASHINGTON (CNN) - Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell holds a slim four-point edge over his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes in a new CNN/ORC International Poll of one of the most closely watched Senate races of 2014.

McConnell's 4-point advantage, 50%-46%, falls within the survey's 4-point sampling error, furthering emphasizing how close this Kentucky contest remains 62 days before Election Day. The outcome of this election may help decide control of the Senate, influence President Barack Obama's final two years in office and determine the political fate of Kentucky's longest-serving senator.

(CNN) - In his strongest words to date, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, tried to quash talk that he would allow another government shutdown if he becomes Senate majority leader next year.

"Of course not. Remember me? I am the guy that gets us out of shutdowns," McConnell told CNN in an exclusive interview Wednesday.

CNN's John King and other top political reporters empty out their notebooks each Sunday on “Inside Politics” to reveal five things that will be in the headlines in the days, weeks and months ahead.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – A Missouri Democratic family feud, a Kentucky Senate tactic worth tracking and some new nuggets about the busy 2016 GOP presidential maneuvering made for an action packed trip around the Inside Politics table: FULL POST

(CNN) - Kentucky's two U.S. Senate candidates traded pithy barbs Saturday at a dual campaign stop in the midst of a race with national implications.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his opponent, Democrat Alison Grimes, appeared in western Kentucky's Fancy Farm Picnic, where they each criticized the experience level of the other candidate.

(CNN) - The female Democratic candidate who hopes to topple Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is out with a new television ad hitting him where Democrats think he is highly vulnerable - with women voters.

The ad is the latest in a series in which Alison Grimes uses real voters to pose questions for McConnell. In this ad, Kentucky resident Illene Woods asks why he voted "two times against the Violence Against Women Act. … and against enforcing equal pay for women?”

(CNN) - It's a fundraising showdown in one of the nation's high stakes Senate contest this year.

Democratic challenger Alison Grimes' campaign announced Tuesday it brought in over $4 million in the past three months - the most a senate candidate in the state has raised during a quarter fundraising period - with $6.2 million cash on hand.

(CNN) - Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic Senate nominee in Kentucky, released a radio ad Wednesday slamming President Barack Obama for "pie in the sky regulations" aimed at her state's coal industry.

Grimes has made it a point to draw a bold line between herself and the White House - most recently on the Obama administration's new Environmental Protection Agency rule that would drastically reduce carbon emission from power plants.

(CNN) - Rand Paul is defending his relationship with Mitch McConnell after helping his fellow Kentuckian defeat a tea party-backed challenger in a GOP Senate primary.

"I came out of the tea party movement. I'm very concerned about the debt. I'm very concerned about big government," Paul said on Friday. "But I think the misnomer is to think somehow Senator McConnell isn't. That's what his whole entire career has been predicated upon - fighting against big government."FULL POST

(CNN) - Kentucky residents awoke Wednesday to a new wave of negative campaign television commercials.

They're just a taste of things to come over the next five months in what's already a very ugly and expensive Senate contest. When it's all over in November, the Bluegrass showdown could break records and become the most expensive Senate campaign in history.